Code, Art, and Maps, oh my!

UPDATE: Feb 26, 2008
I have updated the CoverFlow library a bit and added support for adding children without explicitly setting the width and height of the children (ie using the normal Flex auto-sizing validation stuff). Grab the latest source code here.

I’ve made some much needed performance improvements to the Flex CoverFlow component I released a few days ago. I’ve also taken the concept of 3D Flex containers a little further and added a 3D Carousel container and a vertical version of CoverFlow. Source code here.

Check out the performance now and stop whining (oh, and notice that this blog post has 3 of these embedded 3D components):

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

Performance improvements
When I first released the component I took the shotgun approach to rendering, which meant I rendered the entire scene every frame and all the materials were animated. This is the lazy approach that ensures that the 3D scene always looks right, but it also kills performance. So you poor people out there with computers from the 1980s complained that the component made your browser shoot up to 110% cpu and all that. Instead of telling you to get faster computers I decided to make a few small modifications to speed things up.

First, instead of rendering every frame we’re now rendering only while the animation is happening. This is a sweet improvement that Brock Brinkerhoff suggested in an email he sent me (thanks Brock!). Basically in our enter frame handler we check if Tweener is currently tweening the selected child. If so, we make PaperVision 3D render the scene. If not we just ignore and don’t waste CPU power. This means that once the movement has stopped (ie the selected child comes to rest in the center), the component no longer uses much CPU at all.

The second improvement was to not use animated materials. I added a new material that I called FlexMaterial (and the associated reflected version, ReflectionFlexMaterial). This material is non animated, but listens for FlexEvent.UPDATE_COMPLETE events fired from the child (and all of the child’s children if it has any). Whenever an updateComplete event fires the material re-renders. This ensures that our material is always up-to-date. One note about this: if you have animations in your child components that do not dispatch updateComplete events you’ll have to manually dispatch updateComplete over and over. This is pretty easy, basically what I did for a child that I wanted animated was add the following code in MXML:enterFrame="event.currentTarget.dispatchEvent(new FlexEvent(FlexEvent.UPDATE_COMPLETE))"
and that ensures that the child will always be updated.

Oh, and while I was at it I made a modification to get around the z-ordering issue. This was a problem when you selected one of the planes that was not directly next to the selected one. When the selected plane moved back into place it would move through the other planes on its way. Now we push the selected plane straight back at a faster rate than it moves sideways, seems to have pretty much fixed the issue (at least good enough for my eyes).

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

Vertical CoverFlow
I refactored the code a little bit to allow me to easily change the 3D layout. This let me crank out a vertical version of the CoverFlow component in no time, shown here on the right. This is almost all the same code, just tweaked to lay things out vertically instead of horizontally. I figure this can be used for a sidebar widget. I had to remove the sweet web 2.0 reflections cause I didn’t know where they would go. The cool part about the refactored code is that the base component handles all the core stuff (like creating the 3d scene and planes, etc) and then each extension can simply modify the layout method. Sweet.

Carousel Flex Component
And while I was playing I couldn’t help taking some of Lee Brimelow’s code and making a 3D carousel Flex component. Thanks to Lee for doing the math for me. So here’s a Flex container to do that 3D carousel thingy. One sweet thing is that I took the same approach to preserve full interactivity of the child components. When the selected child is rotated to completely face the user the real child is swapped with the 3D plane and you can fully interact with it just like in a normal Flex app.

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

Take it further
So if you take a look at the source code you’ll see that I’ve created a BasePV3DContainer, which extends ViewStack and creates 3D planes for each child in the container. The idea here is that you can create an extension of this class and implement the layoutChildren() method and make up your own 3D container component. I wouldn’t say the base class I’ve provided is perfect, there’s certainly some code that should get moved around or done differently, but you can figure it out (hell, it’s only 300 some lines of code with comments). If you make any other 3D container Flex components then either post a comment here or drop me an email: doug@dougmccune.com.

Get the source
(Note that this source package include the CoverFlow, Vertical CoverFlow, and Carousel components, as well as an example showing using the CoverFlow component with Flex controls. This does not include the iTunes examples in this post. I’m too lazy to clean that code up well enough to give out.)

Related Posts

UPDATE: Feb 26, 2008 I have updated the CoverFlow library a bit and added support for adding children without explicitly setting the width and height of the children (ie using the normal Flex auto-sizing validation stuff). Grab the latest source code here. Here's a Flex component (with source) that does that sweet looking CoverFlow thing…

Recently I haven't been blogging at all. I've largely fallen off the face of the earth. Take a look at my sent emails from the past week and see if you can figure out why. I use colored labels in gmail to help easily categorize emails. The blue just means it was an email I…

Here are the slides from my presentation at 360|Flex, as well as most of the code I presented. The presentation is embedded below using SlideRocket, or you can view it at the standalone link here. That presentation is almost the same as the one I actually went with in the session (minus a few unimportant…

ArgumentError: Error #2015: Invalid BitmapData.
at flash.display::BitmapData()
at org.papervision3d.materials::MovieMaterial/initBitmap()
at org.papervision3d.materials::MovieMaterial/updateBitmap()
at com.dougmccune.containers.materials::FlexMaterial/handleUpdateComplete()
at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
at mx.core::UIComponent/dispatchEvent()
at mx.managers::LayoutManager/doPhasedInstantiation()
at Function/http://adobe.com/AS3/2006/builtin::apply()
at mx.core::UIComponent/callLaterDispatcher2()
at mx.core::UIComponent/callLaterDispatcher()

@Adnan – yeah, I didn’t implement removeChild and make it remove the 3D planes. I’ll try to update the component soon and implement removeChild correctly. Basically every time a child is removed we need to remove the 3D plane and the reflection 3D plane from the PV3D scene.

just a question about that not uploaded iTunes example: the album covers are embedded in your project or you retrieve them from any online service? Would need some place where to get album covers… but can’t find nothing with a genereous crosssdomain.xml. Anyone knows?

@marc – They’re being loaded in from the my itunes RSS feed that’s available to anyone who purchases music from iTunes. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t give us a friendly crossdomain file, so I’m using a proxy for the images to route them through my server.

I made a Flex Library Project from your sources using FB 3 Beta 2. It makes your components easier to deploy through a CoverFlow.swc library : you only need to add the CoverFlow.swc to the build path of your own project.
You can extend the library by editing the manifest file and adding some more new cool components.

Awesome stuff…. however, I noticed that when I add a component larger than 200 in width, the side towards the direction of motion clips until the animation completes. This was on the Carousel. Any thoughts?

It would also appear that there is some issue with measuring the children inside the view container; padding and borders (on panels) seem to be ignored.

To correct my former post, the size that clipping begins is at 250, not 200. When set to a great value, 1000 for instance, clipping happens on each load of the child, and the reflective plane remains clipped at its furthest extent.

Hey do you think the CoverFlow component can be modified to flow like a carousel, in a loop. My tough is as it advances move the last item from the direction you are going a way from and add it to the direction you are going. Does that make sense. Doug or somebody, let me know.

@Chad, woops, Apple went and changed the way the RSS feed that I was pulling in the images worked. I updated the feed URLs for the My iTunes feed and now it works again. Wasn’t a problem with flash player or the component, it was the data source.

@Arnold – that’s almost all the code that Tink tried to post, it did in fact get a bit cut off at the bottom. I’ve got the code and will be posting a formatted version of it in the comments later tonight.

@Doug – I’ve implemented the addChildAt function so that it works / updates the scene properly. I basically edited BasePV3DContainer.as, copied addChild and renamed it to addChildAt and edited two lines. One line to add offSet as a function param and the 2nd to call the super function.

@ Issac (and those of you experiencing the MovieMaterial error, i.e. ‘1017 The definition of base class MovieMaterial was not found.’ Your problem was answered by Michelle in the previous coverflow post :

“Right click on the project, go to Properties, select Build Path, select the Library Path tab and hit Add SWC for each of the SWC.” The SWC files are located in the libs directory.

Hi Doug, great inspirational resources… I have done a project based on the coverflow principle, but i’m having trouble with the processor when using animated movies, transparent or not, with inner content as materials for planes…

Can you add animated movie materials on more than one plane without losing performance? Also, I’m using a 1024×768 or 800×600 stage setup, precise smooth materials, and even transparency (but that’s an extra)… Somehow, all these kill my processor like crazy…

Those components work perfectly but not in a ViewStack:
I am trying to create two instances of the CoverFlow – each as a child in a ViewStack –
But the application crashes when loading (“Invalid bitmap data…”)

I spent many hours trying to solve this…. any thought?
This would help me a lot!

This component is so sexy, it hurts.
Thanks Doug for all the amazing code you write and make available. It really inspires and educates me to continue to improve my Flex, so maybe I can Flex like you do
Peace

Sorry if this is a lame question as I am bit new to flex. In the samples you have when the album cover is pressed the album info show up the text field. This is not in the downloadable source. I have tried adding a lick() to the panel or the image in the panel this sort of work but it has to be clicked twice. Once to get it to move to be the selected then a second click. I am wondering how to get a click event when you click a panel the first time?

Thanx a ton this is a super cool component you have shared with us.
dave

The example look great but i can get it to work using the Flex 3 getting error Type was not found a complie-time constant CoverFlowContainer . created as new project then standalone copy the zip into src folder the used the example..

Andrew
I had the same problem. I unziped the file outside of flex. Then in flex I created a new project. I copied the lib and the other files into that project. THen open the coverflow mxml file in note pad and copy the code then paste it into you main mxml file in the new project. Pain in the butt but I got it working that way. I have had problems like this with other projects in flex must be a import bug or something.

but wondering if i can get a lil bit of hand as how to modify the source code to change each children (in the main .mxml file) to show images, like how it is demonstrated in this page.
I tried setting the image on each panel using attribute “backgroundImage” but it seems to slow the performance down, and works nothing like the demo

does anyone know how and can provide code to add a few other playback buttons?
id like to stop, play and Pause button or a toggle of play and pause.
(instead of how it behaves now)
A progress bar would be nice but i wont ask to much

In the comments there I show some code that I was using for my PHP proxy. Note that this was before Flickr added proper crossdomain files to their image servers, so you used to need a proxy to load images from Flickr too (now they have a crossdomain file in place).

hi guys just wondering if I could link these picture up to something else so when the user clicks on them they take the user to the located file. also I wanna know if I can change the pictures that are in there and if so please tell me how to do it. also there is another thing that can I publish it to the SWF file.
reply soon thanks.

ok smal:
you can put in swf’s in stead of a jpg’s (thus adding links to related files and the jpg in your swf)

Does anyone know how to truly remove the video flv’s (when using the videocoverflow).
As it stands when the video’s end they really do not leave the app and thus collect up and make the other videos choppy.

Very cool component! Was able to create a library and drop it into my app very quickly. I really like the flexibility of being able to add a Panel (and the endless options that that provides). A big thanks!

My problem/question is I’m leaking memory and I’m not sure how to fix. When my list changes, I use removeAllChildren and then build new children (all Panels), but it doesn’t seem to clean up everything it should…I still see a lot of PaperVision instances running around…and eventually I’m sitting on 100s of meg in memory. Any help out there? I looked at that PaperVision source and it’s over my head at this point – still pretty new to a lot of this stuff.

Just to experiment, I checked out the PaperVision (phunky) source and changed all of the addEventListener calls to use weak references and changed all of the Dictionary constructs to use a parameter of (true). There are still some leaks, but it seems to have cleaned up the bulk of them. Of course, I’m not sure what all I’ve broken by making those changes – some of the Dictionary constructs were explicitly set to (false) – DisplayObjectContainer3D, MaterialList, and MovieMaterial for example. As I said, just experimenting. If there are any PaperVision experts out there, can you shed some light? I’d really like to use this component if I can figure out how to stop the memory leaks. Thanks again!

First of all, great work!
I would like to use the carousel component for my final work in school. Under what license did you publish it?
I allready made a version for testing, you can find it here: http://www.thorstenschmitz.be/dotChallenge/ (As account use demo:demo if you wan’t to create an account). It’s located under the games section.

Awesome if you don’t actually have to use it for something besides a blog example. It’s funny that the title of this post includes “performance improvement” because the performance is deplorable. Don’t get me wrong. It’s an awesome example of Flex “possibilities.” However, it’s no more than toy, not a real-world component. As soon as you get about 20 items into it, the reflections can’t keep up. It’s a very surreal (and unpleasant) effect to see a reflection lagging behind the reflected object.

I guess this makes me one of the whiners. But I’d hate to see someone (me for instance) waste a lot of hours trying to make this work in a real project only to find himself back at the drawing board with an angry client on the phone. The examples on this page use the component to display album covers. (I hope you have narrow musical tastes, like no more than fifteen albums.)

Joe, you are absolutely right. but even professional components, like those from flashloaded are even much worse!!

Joe, i think you hit the right point with: “But I’d hate to see someone (me for instance) waste a lot of hours trying to make this work in a real project only to find himself back at the drawing board with an angry client on the phone.”

what you call a component – not matter if it’s free or not – should be a REALLY flexible piece of code. i’ve already had dozens of such deceptions and finally rebuilt nearly any component myself at the end – nothing funny when your customer already saw your simple coverflow demo. the same will most probably happen here as well…

anyway, what about a strategy for “many” childs. i mean 3, 5, 7 or in some case 9 childs are realistic, but more child don’t run properly. this is not what i call flexible, it’s actually a demonstration tool – not enough to call it a “component”.

it is currently a huge stress to add any kind of dynamic behavior, you obviously never tried it. the problem is very simple: everything is based on the child-index. but the child indicees change as soon as you remove or add a child at index 0, the selectedIndex changes after these operations. it should be based on a dataprovider IMO.

and in any way, the current memory leaks (=missing support for removeChild) makes any dynamic behavior nearly impossible.

I’ve been playing around with the carousel and coverflow containers.
I have added some script to loop from an array, pulling in images locally to display within the carousel. I’m stuck on a few points though, if anyone can help me..?

The images I need to load in are all stored within the root folder. When the script runs, the ‘image.source = e.currentTarget.content;’ line only seems to append one image to the last panel. I am outputting the actual items from the array onto the panel as a label, and the links take the user through to the correct video, I just can’t seem to get the right image to load onto the correct panel, and it’s driving me nuts.

Also, can it be adapted to work without the panels, and just show the images, as you have in your iTunes examples..?

Dan, the numChildren member is not incremented when you add child objects dynamically. Define a variable in CoverFlowContainer and keep track of the child count in addChild and removeChild overrides. Bind the value of this count to the scroll bar like,
maxPosition=”{coverflow.myNumChildren – 1}”

thx for the work. Was exactly what I needed to build upon. If I want to place the coverFlow as a component in a viewStack container an error 2015 is thrown. (invalidBitmap data stuff). Is there any known work around I need the viewStack and due to dta transfers within the viewStack I need the creationPolicy set to all.

I found the selectedIndex variable within one of the .as files, but wasnt sure how to either a) reference it from the mxml file, as it wasn’t declared, or b) create the function within to move using buttons within the .as file, and call that from the mxml file.

If anyone can help me with a sample or some suggestions, I’d really appreciate it. My AS3 skills are getting better, but I haven’t done too much involving classes or packages yet.

I have one question, might be with the SWC, but it works perfectly whenever it’s on my computer, but if I upload to a server and then load, it doesn’t work, is there something I need to do with the swcs?

interesting error:using any of the containers in a flex application works. However, in an AIR app, it just crashes(Invalid Bitmap Data in the MovieMaterial.as). I’m an old c++, java guy new to flex. Help with this will be greatly appreciated.

The iTunes example uses my custom RSS feed, and also uses an image proxy on my server that I set up, so the source of that example wouldn’t be workable for anyone else not running the example on my server with my iTunes feed, which is why I didn’t post it.

I have developed an application with the coverflow contrainer and flex controls (panels, datagrids, accordions, flex google maps, etc.). Some of the panels are not visible when displayed in the back, only the reflection shows which is kind of weird. Anyone can help? I would appreciate any advice and help here. Thanks!

i currently using your carousel as a menu for my application.then i use click event from each carousel menu to display particular content. i refering the click event to the target content with id from the viewstack.it work fine with 2 menus.but at the next menu i having an error “Error #2007: Parameter child must be non-null.”maybe this is a stupid question but im gladfull if u can tell me what cause the error because im quite new with flex.

However , I am facing some different problems, I doubt the example works fine with the current papervision code, the package org.papervision3d.scenes.MovieScene3D is needed to run the application. but I could not find any such class in the latest distribution. Please help.
The errors I am getting are as follows

1061: Call to a possibly undefined method renderCamera through a reference with static type org.papervision3d.scenes:Scene3D. project/src/com/dougmccune/containers BasePV3DContainer.as line 191

Hi, excellent component ..sure !
but i’m getting desperate i don’t manage to remove/add any child dynamically.
My purpose is to allow user interaction that make all coverflow children be deleted and
replaced with new ones (canvas embedding swfloaders items).
If i try to add directly any child, the display doesn’t change, nothing seems to be added whereas debugging the code shows that something is added…and the layoutCoverflow is well called after…
If I removeallChildren, only one of the new items is visible, on top left of coverflow, in 2D mode.
So, like some other people, I would to know if it is really possible with last version of source code you shared without lot of modifications that I couldn’t realize myself at this time (flex beginner)
thanks a lot for any response and sorry for my poor english
++

Sorry for the newbie question but with the Carousel how do you get images closer together? I’ve tried to H spacing and almost every other parameter but I’m stuck!!! I can change the regular coverflow component.

Hi,
Nice component from where i will learn a lot.
I tried to modify it a little bit and play around … I’ve seen that the text is not displayed in the reflection, do you know why? Can you send me some directions on how to do the display of text ?

This looks great! I am new to Flex but i do not see how you did the cover art, the example I downloaded has the Panels, is there another location i can download the other source files from? I really want to make this load my images dynamically!

Hi .. am trying to make a gallery out of ur excellent sample.. i was wondering how to make it such that i can toggle between carousel and coverflow .. plzz suggest .. .i have seen such an implementation elsewhere .. so any inputs plzzz…
thanks in advance …

Hi
nice job
im tring to add and remove childs , and override the addChildAt in the same way like addChild , thats for i want to remove the last chaild of the right an add a child in the first position of the left when the scrollbar is clicked in the left =P, and remove the first child of the left and add child in the last position of the right when go right, but the layout dosen`t show like i said =(
any help pls

I wanted to combine your Carousel component with another I found that uses Papervision3D — Flipcard (http://code.google.com/p/flipcard/)… my plan was to create a carousel display of Flipcards, with an image on one side and flipping to reveal text info on the back. I got both working in separate projects, but get compile errors when I try to combine them in the same project.

There seems to be a namespace conflict between the PV3D libraries used by the two components. Flipcard uses Papervision3D_2.0.883.swc; including that in the same project with Carousel gives me compile errors in BasePV3DContainer.as, leaving it out gives me errors in the Flipcard code. Any ideas how to resolve this problem?

Need a way to remove the nearly 40px border that it appears is being put around the main coverflow window. Cannot find where to do this. It looks like whatever color is in there also has a gradient applied to it, but I cannot find instance of that in your code. Example: if I change the background color of the coverflow container to something really obvious, like bright green, and then change the background color of the containing flex application tag to another color like pink, when I embed the resulting swf in my html page, there is a wide pink border (like 40+ pixels) around the coverflow with a gradient within the green area. Any ideas? Thanks!

I’ve downloaded your code and I have tried to implement it into my app. However, I have an error message that I can not get rid of. It says renderCamera in BasePV3DContainer is an undefined method through org.papervision3d.scenes:Scene3D.

Does anyone have any idea what’s wrong? I imported the swc files and the class files. I am also running flex 3, so I can’t see why this is happening.

Yo Doug love the component, would like to see it updated to the latest 2.1 paper though, also there aint no way i tried all i could to combine EFFLEX effects with this one…
my site is already depending on those effects and i want to add some coverflow.. even if i use a swfloader to load it into a container used by efflex it wont work…
such a pitty
thanks anyways

I am a little late to the party with finding this cool toolset. Not sure if you are still reading the comments but I had one question. At the top it said updated so you didn’t have to hard set the size of the children of coverflow, but rather could let them autosize. When I do that they get stretched to fill the screen and all the 3d flipping stops.

Hey guys, I’m not so bright. Can anyone give me real .mxml examples on how to implement to two different containers on this page? How do you feed the images? I saw the example .mxml file with the componenets, but that is not something I would do if I was just loading up images. Any help is approceiated.

I tried running your code but I get the following compilation error in FlexMaterial.as :
“Multiple markers at this line: -1017: The definition of base class MovieMaterial was not found. –
FlexMaterial”.
Could you please shed some light on it?
Thanks in advance.

I have extended your code to create a cylindrical 3D wall which contains an array of buttons.
The problem that I am facing right now is to make all the buttons interactive.
Can you suggest a way by which I can make all the panels interactive simultaneously (right now the only the front-panel/selected-child is interactive).

can you show an example of large images say size will be around 475 px by 350 px?

I am working on a project where i have a tryptch screen and i am using the component here. I am facing a problem using the component with large images..i am not able to control the horizontal spacing and the main image covers the side images.

Great job! Can you please tell me what would be involved in making the coverflow component loop continuously instead of going from start to end? Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any component like that even after a lot of Google search.

Some people have indicated there willingness to rework the coverflow component and sell it on our website http://www.flexdownloads.com. We will put the appropriate licensing text in those articles for sale.

I was trying to use your horizontal coverflow and I’m just using an external xml file to retrieve my images to display. After doing the actionscript to add childs to the coverflow and when I run it, the childs are showing, but the effect of the coverflow is not working. Please help.

I have gotten this to work in a dynamic way, but I am unable to get a link in each panel to work. As well as to have a different background image in each. If you would like a copy of the code email I and I will gladly share if you can help with my last two issues.

i am having issues with release build version. please help. everything works fine in debug or running from flex builder, but when Export > Release Build i lose the coverflow features. The element is still there, but it acts more like a viewstack. (its root) i dont see any other panel other than the active one.

i think it is a library export issue, but adding the swc files into the build path > libraries tab doesnt change anything as far as i can tell.

Is it possible to increase the diameter of the circle in this awesome component? When lots of images are added, they get bunched close together, and I would therefore like to make the circle holding the images bigger… I tried playing with the “radius” variable inside CarouselContainer.as with no luck.

Hi there, great component but I’m having one problem with the vertical coverflow example. The entries within the component start at the bottom, when I want them to start at the top. EX: Scrollbar is at the top, selected item in coverflow container is at the bottom. When I scroll down on the scrollbar, the coverflow scrolls up. Any suggestions?

Also, any chance I could get a look at your vertical coverflow example source?

Great component!
I have one suggestion – in the CoverFlowContainer.as you should override the removeAllChildren function to reset the maxChildHeight and maxChildWidth internal variables.

I have used this component in an air app where it displays items that can be added to a tree (more complicated than that but you get the idea) and when it is first displayed it is fairly small but as you roll over it, it is resized to a bigger more useful size, then shrinks again when you roll out. But since the only way to pull this off is to remove all the child object whenever it is resized and add them back, the max child height/width remain at the big side and the re-shrunk version now is center almost off screen (below the scroll bar).

Hi, I find out how to add children, but now I’m experiecing this problem.
Sometimes, when the flex is loaded, CoverFlow show the first child, then a shadow below it (like all the other components would be in the back one on the other). After some scrolling, everything works perfectly.
Any idea of this behaviour?

PS. I noticed that it happens when the component seems to be loading resources from the net…

Doug, Thank you for this piece of work. Everything is working great. However, my objects seem to pop into position at the end of the transition. I have tried several different transition types. That just makes it worse. The reflection is smooth as silk. But the main object gets close and then pops in. Any suggestions?

hey im new on flex but i have some problem whit this component, y make a render whit the framework 3.5.0 on linux, when i do it whit 3.0 i dont have it, but i make a upgrade for problems whit the grid on that framework, so change the framework, but this component dont apear wen i make a search, and i dont understand why only on this scene dont work, i already like so much this component…

Somehow i dont get a full circle in Carousel component layout. Like the circle is cutoff! For example, if i put 6 panels in Carousel, the panels are not equally arranged in circle, but after the 6th panel, its like 2 panels are missing before the first panel starts again! Any idea please?

Has anyone used the carousel component ? I need an example . Can some one post the mxml. Newbie in flex. Dont know jack yet. I gotta add some images to the carousel and dispatch some events from each of those images. Need an example of how one can do it. Need this for the Carousel.

Thank you for these components, but unfortunately I had the same problem as haozi. I ended up using this coverflow:http://www.flashxml.net/cover-flow.html because their support helped me to use Chinese characters. I recommend you to implement this feature, too.
Have a nice day!

Fantastic stuff…….
Anyone knows how to set the default “opening child” to be anything else other than the first PANEL?
For example…..if I have 30 panels (images) …when I open the frame I want to see number 15….
just like Doug’s first example on this page….